Spring 2009

Businesses needing to deliver engineering parts and spares to field workers will have a new option for stocking and distributing them, following the launch of a joint venture between ACAL, an international value-added distributor, and ByBox, the UK's leading operator of drop-box parts delivery services.

Not only will the system offer a slicker parts delivery service, says ByBox chief executive Stuart Miller; it also opens up the possibility of separate user-companies sharing common inventory, reducing their overall costs.

'This becomes possible because we can improve visibility vastly,' Miller says, 'allowing users to reduce stockholding or squeeze more value from current stock levels.'

Currently, customers using the ByBox service stock their own parts, which are fed out to the ByBox network, then either used or recovered. Unused items are brought back to ByBox's hub and finally returned to the owning company.

 

Under the joint venture, unused parts will circulate in a shared system, and be kept 'in play' throughout the delivery cycle, whether they are with an engineer, on board a van, en route back to base or in storage. ACAL's own warehousing will provide a central repository for them.

ByBox's Thinventory software system will provide continuous real-time tracking of the products' location and (crucially) their status, giving client companies unprecedented visibility of inventory, along with the ability to share items that are not in short supply.

Miller says this means stock can be taken out of the system, since there will be less need for planned redundancy, and could also mean fewer movements, since available parts can be diverted across the network when required without having to be returned to base every time.